Arch McDonald, baseball voices like, Mel Allen and Garnett Marks; Meanwhile, Red Barber with the Dodgers!

To celebrate the new baseball year, we continue Curt Smith’s series, Voices of Summer, on the game’s all-time announcers that will appear regularly through 2025. Today, Arch McDonald, Depression Washington’s most famous Voice save Franklin D. Roosevelt.

By CURT SMITH

For a long time, the radio re-creation was a rite like gloves left between innings on the field. A stick hitting hollow wood simulated bat v. ball. The soundtrack included background murmur. Infield: “Come on, babe, bear down.” Manager: “Don’t give in!” Fan: You couldn’t hit my house!” Not much was real. Reality: It didn’t matter to Washington’s baseball P.T. Barnum.

Arch McDonald re-created games in a People’s drug store three blocks from the White House. Said the Washington Star’s Morris Siegel: “He’d draw more people than the baseball Senators at Griffith Stadium.” Recalling the ex-butcher, crop hand, fight referee, oil rigger, patent medicine man, peanut vendor, refrigerator salesman, and soda jerk, it is easy to see why.

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office. A banking crisis shrouded his inauguration. Contagion roiled 16 million unemployed. A year earlier, Arch became the first The Sporting News (TSN) “Announcer of the Year.” “At [Class A] Chattanooga!” gaped Washington Post writer Shirley Povich. “He wins a fan vote over big-league guys.” The Arkansan had once struggled to make a living. “All owners have a players’ scouting system,” mused Povich.  “Thank God [Senators’ owner] Clark Griffith had one for announcers, too.”

In 1934, Arch trudged to Washington, its team second division for 20 of the next 23 years. Presently it heard his “right down Broadway” (strike) and “ducks on the pond” (base runners) and “There she goes, Mrs. Murphy.” (Senators a.k.a. Nationals or Nats home run) Upon a save, key hit, or “our boys’” 6-4-3, listeners braced themselves: McDonald would sing a hillbilly ballad, “They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree.”

Then, in 1939, small-town and -timey, Arch entered, despite its bombast, a phantasmagoric place. “Feel you will go over as big in New York City as you did in Washington,” wrote umpire Bill McGowan. Despite naming Joe DiMaggio “The Yankee Clipper,” McDonald did not. “Yanks fans thought him country,” Siegel noted. After a year in the Big Apple, he sailed home, still loved by D.C.  Some people impress you most on first meeting. Arch grew, like the bourbon he inhaled.

In 1939, he headed CBS Radio’s coverage of the Hall of Fame opening.  In1942, TSN again honored him, saying, “McDonald can emit a banshee wail when a player hits into a bases-loaded double play. And he can whoop it up like a holy roller when Washington runs are crossing the plate.” Arch worked in pre-air conditioned undies. In 1946, Arch ran for Congress, losing to Republican Glen Beall in suburban Montgomery County. “Politics, broadcasting, it’s entertainment!” McDonald howled. Proof: his cascade of re-creation.

Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella said famously,” You have to be a man to be a big-leaguer, but you have to have a little boy in you, too.” There was a lot of man—260 pounds—in McDonald. Much of it was little boy. He broadcast each game from Washington’s G Street drug store’s second floor. “Arch’d be beside an open window with crowd noise and taped bells going off,” said Povich. “McDonald would entertain, and outside groupies roared.”

Ultimately, he moved to the basement studio. “Dad was in a glass booth, with bleachers all around,” said son Arch Jr. “The Senators were always in the cellar—but all the seats were filled.” Western Union supplied nuts and bolts. On each safety, McDonald struck a gong. “If Clint Courtney singled, Dad hit it once. If Roy Sievers homered, Pop smashed it four times.”

McDonald made each game a carnival, each day a Mardi Gras, and every fan a king (Bill Veeck). Yet in 1956, the Senators dropped him: “a sponsor change,” Siegel explained. “After 23 years with the Nats, he never went to another game.” On October 16, 1960, the football Redskins entrained for New York. Returning, Arch, 59, died of a heart attack while playing hearts. In 1999, the Baseball Hall of Fame posthumously gave him the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence. Sadly, no one sang “They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree.”

Next: The only Voice to broadcast in the past tense, Waite Hoyt.